"Readicide" by Gallagher

Gallagher's "Readicide" offered many valuable insights to the problem facing many highschool students today. I discussed with my mom, who has worked as a teacher's aid for years with elementary grades, the assertion that 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders often have a love of reading that is slowly killed in later years, and she agreed emphatically. It's not a problem that I've seen firsthand yet, but it is a fascinating trend and clearly an important place to start if we are to improve the situation.
I agree with Gallagher that, for many teachers, one problem is torturing the text to death. There would be nothing worse than taking an interesting text and analyzing it dozens of ways until finally the students are sick of it and eager to move on. If we, as the teacher, find the text interesting, we should want some students to be able to choose to come back to it on their own, but too many students, including me, have determined to avoid certain books for the rest of our lives, even realizing their theoretical merit, just because they were presenting poorly for far too long. The poem Gallagher referenced was entirely appropriate, where the frustrated reader tries beating the poem to death with a hose to find out what it means. This poem should be shared in every poetry unit that any student ever takes, because it will be something that the student can identify with and finally see themselves from a bird's eye view so that they can change their strategy.
There were, though, as usual, some things I could not agree with. One of them is a sheer matter of practicality. Gallagher advocates that students read complete long works, and that they be given time to read them in class. I've never seen a classroom where this would ever be possible. Maybe it would be a wonderful thing if all students were given a reading hour every day so that they could delve into their books, but we all know that many students who would most have benefited from the practice would misuse the time with any possible distraction that presents itself. The solution that I think is far better is to make use of well-sized excerpts of books, of 50=150 pages. This would also allow the students to be exposed to many more genres and time periods. My mantra, as a teacher, would be that, at some point, every student will have read something that intrigues them enough that they want to return to it on their own time. If we have them read part of a sports story, part of a fantasy novel, part of a work of historical fiction, part of a science-fiction piece, part of a thriller, part of a murder mystery, etc. we have got to eventually stumble on something that each student will relate to. Each student should have a reason to go looking for more material that fascinates them. This is the teachers' real end-goal, not to get the students to read in class, but to get them to read outside of class.